It is with immense pleasure that we bring to you the 4th Edition of the OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook by Packt Publishing!

Brought to you by 4 talented authors from Rackspace: Kevin Jackson, Cody Bunch, Egle Sigler and James Denton; a host of tenacious technical reviewers: Christian Ashby, Stefano Canepa, Ricky Donato, Geoff Higginbottom, Andy McCrae, and Wojciech Sciesinski; and a Packt team keeping us in check!

We have listened to your feedback and attempted to bend as many rules as we can to bring you a book that will help you understand, deploy and operate an OpenStack cloud environment.

When the 1st Edition was written in 2012, I didn’t think I’d still be updating it today to make a 4th Edition! Thank you to everyone involved. To the clever people that helped bring this to fruition, I thank you. To our readers – please enjoy!

Thanks to Cody Bunch and Egle Sigler – and whole bunch of tech reviewers spanning the cloud and OpenStack community, the OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook has had its 3rd reboot. We cover configuration of Nova, Neutron, Glance, Keystone, Cinder and Swift. We show you how to use these. We show you how to use Ansible to deploy this in your datacentre. We show you how to use things like Heat and Cloud-Init to automate your cloud application environments as well as the latest and greatest like DVR and FWaaS.

We provide this with an accompanying multi-node Vagrant environment, where you can try out the steps in the book using free and open source stools such as VirtualBox and Vagrant – and we always make the latest versions of OpenStack available here too.

This is the best book in the series by far and now it’s available to buy here.

The OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook, 3rd Edition is due for publication in August 2015. You can reserve a copy and get a whopping 30% Off with the code OCCC30 if used before July 25th 2015 from the Packt website.

I started writing the first edition back in 2011. Back then, OpenStack Diablo was THE production ready release. It had many promises and I was keen to learn more after dipping my toes into the OpenStack water with the Bexar release months before. Of course, I pronounced this wrong. So much for a country who frowns upon our additional characters in the English language.

This book was very popular and has taken me on a journey I wasn’t expecting. As time went on, Diablo wasn’t as hot property as it sounds and after being approached by none other than Cody Bunch who convinced me to write another, the 2nd Edition was needed. This was another 10 months getting a “few updates” in the book. This was published in June 2013 and was based on Grizzly.

Fast forward towards the end of 2014 and through a mental lapse, Cody yet again thought it might be a good idea to do another. Along the way of ideas, we picked up the esteemed Egle Sigler. Putting in a few more updates and with 50% more help, this would be a breeze to get the book updated for Juno. Or so we thought.

About 8 months later, we made it. We have updated sections that include how to install the very latest OpenStack Kilo using Ansible. Over 110 recipes has had an upgrade, rewrite or is a brand new addition to the book. We listened and we have a book that takes you through all the essential components and much more. We take you through step by step instructions on how you could run this in your datacentres.

We wouldn’t have made this possible without the immense valuable feedback from our tech reviewers. Thank you for keeping us on track and making this book even better than it was going to be:

We really do appreciate our readers taking the time and effort to write reviews of our book. We actively encourage feedback and this is presented in the book on how to do this. As we maintain a very active GitHub repository of a complete working OpenStack environment, code and examples – we positively encourage people to give us feedback so we can improve our code and writing.

UPDATE: The reviewer contacted us to say how happy he was to have his concerns addressed and as a result, the review has been removed. Thank you. I have removed references to emails so this post offers a guide to future reviewers on how to give us feedback.

The problem with reviews is that it tends to be a one-sided conversation though, with us only being able to respond to the damage that has already been done. We were recently alerted to a 2-star Amazon review [Edit: Now removed] that contradicted conversations that I’d had with the reviewer. We thought the best way to address this was by explaining why the review is incorrect. A rebuttal 5-star review by an author would help fix the ratings – as people do judge Amazon books by the star ratings – but would be false and equally damaging.

Fortunately in this incident, I had a 2-way conversation with this reviewer. It started on Twitter then progressed to email.

The first issue was to raise awareness around syntax used in the book and the use of under_scores and not hyphen-ated flags.

This is perfectly valid syntaxas shown below:

The example used in the review incorrectly asserts that the syntax we used is not valid. This is also mythbusted below too:

The second issue was that of the Kindle version introducing extra spaces in the syntax. In the PDF there are no such spaces:

How to give feedback

Please contact any of us on Twitter, or email book @ openstackbook.com, fill in bug information on GitHub regarding the environment and scripts not working, or directly with the Publisher. You can follow us and comment on G+ and you can like or post messages on Facebook. You can even leave a comment below.

In order to operate OpenStack Identity service with an external authentication source, it is necessary that one have an external authentication service available. In the OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook, we used OpenLDAP. As installing and configuring OpenLDAP is beyond the scope of the book, that information is provided here.

Getting ready

We will be performing an installation and configuration of OpenLDAP on it’s own Ubuntu 14.04 server.

How to do it…

We will break this into two steps: installing OpenLDAP, and configuring it for use with OpenStack.

Installing OpenLDAP

Once you are logged in, to your Ubuntu 14.04 node, run the following commands to install OpenLDAP:
We set the Ubuntu installer to non-interactive, as we will be providing the configuration values for OpenLDAP prior to installation:

How it works…

What we have done here is install OpenLDAP on Ubuntu 14.04. Additionally we created an LDAP schema, configuring the userAccountControl property, and configuring a ‘user’ object to provide login authorization.

The OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook has been written in such a way so that our readers can follow each section to understand, install and configure each component of the OpenStack environment. We cover Compute (Nova), Identity (Keystone), Image (Glance), Networking (Neutron), Storage (Cinder and Swift) as well as many other services such as how to install these components using Ansible. As such, there are elements of the OpenStack environment that don’t fit in any particular chapter. These supporting services are: